I find there to be a lot of value in actively managing your career. I've been a technical individual contributor, a manager, a business owner, and a cross-team supporter in my various positions. Each one has challenges, and in each case, I've found ways to build a better career position that not only suits me but makes my life more enjoyable. I hope to inspire others to do the same, and this is part of a series of editorials based on advice I've read from Raylene Yung (Facebook and Stripe) on your engineering career.

One of the first things I read was that engineers ought to aim to be valuable, but not critical. This is similar to the advice from others that good tech staff try to work themselves out of a job by documenting and sharing everything. Not everyone is a great, or even good, engineer, so I understand why it can be scary to share knowledge. However, many of us find ourselves doing something that few, or no one else, does anyway.

Viewing this as being valuable is helpful. However, if you are critical and the only one that can do something, you might find yourself on-call, or under a lot of pressure from management when something goes wrong. Instead, if you have the detailed knowledge, but you've shared that in some way, you can be the consultant or advisor rather than the person everyone expects to be doing the work in a crisis. This is a mistake I've made many times in my career.

You want to provide value in some way to your organization, but not be a single point of failure. In the short term, your manager might feel you can't be replaced, but often I listen to managers talking about their plans to find a way to remove those critical people who don't want to share their knowledge from that position. Usually, removal also is accompanied by termination.

Good engineers find ways to be valuable, partially by gathering tribal knowledge, partially by developing solutions, and partially by sharing with others. Document, explain, train, and assist others, but ensure that if you want to go on vacation, sleep all night, or celebrate life away from work, you aren't the critical person during a crisis or even normal, daily work.